Ministry of Innovation —

Kickstarter Game Watch: From Rohrer to Republique

This week: DS strategy, unique stealth-action, and a new "SpaceVenture"

Ever since Double Fine's Adventure game Kickstarter project ended up breaking records, game developers of all stripes have been flocking to Kickstarter to seek funding for their pet projects. Kickstarter Game Watch is an occasional feature calling attention to some of the most interesting and/or high-profile games currently seeking funds on the service.

Diamond Trust of London

Launched: May 10, 2012Concludes: May 26, 2012Current Funding: $22,897 out of $78,715 goal

The overwhelming majority of games seeking funding on Kickstarter are necessarily designed for platforms with relatively few barriers to entry, like the PC, Mac, or mobile phones. Diamond Trust of London bucks this trend, becoming what looks like the first retail Nintendo DS game to look for funding on the site.

Created by Jason Rohrer, the indie auteur best known for thoughtful games like Passage, Sleep is Death, and Inside a Star-filled Sky, Diamond Trust was picked up for publishing by Zoo Games' IndiePub label last year and was finalized last October before waiting seven months for final approval by Nintendo. With that approval now in hand, Rohrer says he faces a new problem: determining whether there's enough of a market for the game to satisfy Nintendo's "large manufacturing minimum" for retail DS titles. "Kickstarter is a perfect way to answer that question," Rohrer writes.

The game itself is a multiplayer-only, board-game-style positional strategy title focusing on secret Angolan Diamond traders. DS download play allows multiple players to share one cartridge across multiple systems, and lets the game reveal a player's secret information without that player being aware that they've been compromised. The game also boasts a unique "interactive music engine" that changes the background noise as you play.

A pledge of $35 gets you a shipped copy of the game, while pledging $55 or more gets you a limited edition cartridge with secret "historical objects" that Rohrer promises will be unique to each purchase.

Republique

An interesting-looking take on the stealth-action and survival horror genres, Republique sports a "1984-inspired story" all about helping a young woman named Hope escape a shadowy totalitarian state. Rather than directly controlling Hope, though, you have to help indirectly by monitoring surveillance camera footage and hacking into various computer and security systems so she can make her move.

Republique is the first effort from new indie studio Camoflaj, but that doesn't mean the development team is untested: the company's developers have previously worked on franchises like Metal Gear Solid, Halo, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and F.E.A.R. The developers also recently announced that David "Solid Snake" Hayter and Jennifer "female Shepard" Hale would be providing voice talent for the game, helping to move the four- to six-hour story along.

You'd think a game with this kind of premise and development pedigree wouldn't have any trouble easily soaring past its $500,000 funding goal, but Republique has largely struggled to attract significant donations—it had only raised about $150,000 as of about two weeks ago. Things have picked up quite a bit as tomorrow's funding deadline approaches, with funders bringing in over $40,000 yesterday alone, but the game still needs just over $100,000 in a little over 24 hours to get over the finish line.

Pledges start at $10 for the iOS edition and $15 for a downloadable copy of the desktop edition, going all the way up to $10,000 for those who want to be flown out for a personal tour of Camoflaj HQ.

"Two Guys From Andromeda" Spaceventure

Classic PC adventure game fans will remember Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe as the "Two Guys from Andromeda" that brought you the sprawling Space Quest series. Now, 17 years after the sixth and final game in that series, the pair has teamed up again for a new "SpaceVenture" Kickstarter project. While the new game won't actually be a true sequel to the Space Quest series, the creators are promising this spiritual successor will include the kinds of pop culture references, humor, art design, and "hilarious death sequences" that series fans know and love.

With over one-fifth of the $500,000 goal already raised in about a day, and 32 more days to go before the deadline, this project looks well on its way to becoming a reality. The creators say that beating that goal by a substantial margin will help fund "the full scope of what's brewing in our heads right now." That includes elaborate animation and audio work, as well as a world-class voice acting team that's set to include Ellen McLain (GlaDOS from Portal), John Patrick Lowrie (Team Fortress 2's Sniper), and Rob Paulsen (Pinky from Pinky & The Brain) among others.

A $15 pledge gets you a downloadable version of the game, while $100 gets you an old-fashioned, Sierra-style big game box filled with extras.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl